First, all of yesterday's pictures HERE. If you don't like pictures of things like vineyards and rivers and pretty scenery, these pictures are not for you!
10:15pm - phew, long day! Set out around 8:45 and got an amazing half-bread, half-croissant thing filled with chocolate for breakfast. Found Eugenia, our free walking tour guide. The tour went through all the main sites and included a ton of detail and history. And it lasted over 3.5 hours! she was amazing and not only remembered where everyone was from but also all our names! She recommended a good place for home cooking but it looked like a decent walk away and Liza had to get a train later so we walked up a bit to a place we had wandered by before that had looked good called, I think, Luso. I had what turned out to essentially be steak and potatoes. It was delicious. All they put on the potatoes was olive oil, salt, and rosemary, but they were ridiculous.
After lunch we hit a couple of sights the tour went by but not in, including the Lello bookstore, which supposedly inspired JK Rowling for Harry Potter when she lived in Porto. Very pretty, but under renovation right now.
Then it was time for Liza to leave! :( We thought she was going to have to walk down to the closer train station to get a taxi to the other train station, but there were taxis lined up at the main square right down the street, so that was lucky. By the way, we figured out that the big event tomorrow is a huge CAR rally/race, not a political rally. Tomorrow the middle of town is basically going to be a nightmare. I'll come back to that later.
After Liza left I went to the market and bought some cherries and a couple types of olives. 400 grams of olives (almost a pound) cost 1.50 euros. I freaking love this place. Dropped off the produce and wandered around a bit. Around 7 I went for an early dinner at Tapabento, which was recommended by the guide as having good snacks/petiscos. I had a toast with tomato and top-quality ham and sautéed portobello mushrooms in garlic and olive oil. Delicious! And a white sangria, also delicious! It was a bit pricier than other places at 20 euros, but worth it. I then went back to Cremosi and actually had gelato this time. Also delicious!
Walked over the river on an inordinately high bridge and caught the sunset. Totally worth all the effort. And it was also totally worth the 1.80 to take the tram back to the stop right by the apartment.
Tomorrow I was supposed to take a tour of a couple cities north of Porto, but it was canceled because no one else booked. I will try to do the towns on my own, which shouldn't be too hard if I can figure out how to catch a bus between them, since they are both connected to Porto by cheap hour-long trains. And since that rally thing is going on tomorrow I thought it would be good to still try to get out of the city!
I took a ton of pictures today so they will take forever to upload. Will get them up as soon as possible!
Today's totals: 26,574 steps, 10.58 miles, 72 floors
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